Tag Archives: awesome

In the blink of an eye over one thousand days have passed, and where have we been? The blog has been drier than California and the once so steady beat of the war drum has echoed of to a better place. But today, we celebrate the return of the original conquistadores of the mobile platform. Time to resurface.

So what have we done during this era of non-awesomness? Spent ages just walking in circles, “just to make the point”? Becoming the new champions of open source? Doing backstrokes in the good ol’ money bin? Nobody knows, but if you look closely, some apps may have flown under the radar and made the world a slightly less pointless place.

But here we are now, so let us entertain you. In the coming days, weeks, years or maybe never, we will release something so fun, clever and awesome and so god damn innovative that it will change every social gamers life forever. We call it The Future of Gaming. Vasco da Gama. So stay tuned for more news, cuz that thing coming over the hill is a monster. A monster!
In the meantime, check out Flip! One of our kick ass developers has infiltrated a local firm and helped them make a genre defining game. It’s a touch friendly version of one of the few board games that still hasn’t been conquered by the human mind, so the AI here is truly remarkable. Yup, it’s the beloved simulation of the race war: Reversi. You owe it to yourself and your inner demon to check out this baby. It’s free as in free beer, and takes up less space than Top Gun at 4K, so hurry up before its to late! And even though the developers gives it away for free, feel free to buy me a beer next time we meet if you like it.

Say hello to our latest app! Status Report is a combined client for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Foursquare (so far) that mixes all of your feeds into one grand unified feed. It also combines mirrored updates into one, for when someone mirrors their Twitter posts into their Facebook stream, or tweets every Instagram shot and you follow them on both services.

It also has support for liking, commenting, retweeting, favoriting etc. depending on the service the update comes from. You can also write new status updates and choose which of your connected services you want to send them from.

When following links you can save them to Instapaper for later reading regardless of which service the link was posted to.

I can’t even remember what life was like before this app when I had to tap through a whole bunch of different apps several times a day just to get the lay of the land. It has totally changed my life, maybe it will change yours too! It’s just 99 cents on the App Store so give it a try and tell us what you think 😀

We started promoting our new game’s landing page a few days ago at http://ondersetgonas.com/warcode/ but in case you missed it, the name of the game will be Warcode!

We also did a short presentation of the game and some of the technology we use at the local Mac/iPhone programming group Cocoaheads Göteborg. The presentation probably doesn’t make a lot of sense without the narration, but it probably didn’t make a lot of sense with it either so no loss. We uploaded the presentation anyway, enjoy:

Please note that the graphics that are visible in one of the slides are not done by the famous Mia Henriksson, this is just my crappy temporary stuff.

Also if you’d like to beta test the software before we launch or just be notified as soon as we do launch, follow us on twitter or sign up on the Warcode page!

I’ll try and post some updates on the progress here on the blog and on Twitter (@ondersetgonas) so stay tuned homeboyz!

Finally time to spill the beans to our loyal fans here on the blawgh! We’re currently wireframing and coding our latest app, which will be an iPhone game inspired by the 1991 classic, the game console Barcode Battler (check out this review if you haven’t heard of it).

I used to have one of those and while it sucked gameplay-wise, the idea was so much greater than the implementation and has been a source of inspiration for me ever since. It opened my eyes and made me understand that all those coded messages all around us can mean whatever we want, and our mission is to provide the means to interpret them in the most awesome way, by turning them into brutal warriors to fight epic battles in the vast deserts of what we today know is called cyberspace.

The app uses the iPhone’s camera to scan barcodes and is the first attempted game by Önders et Gonas, so we’re boldly going where we haven’t really been before a lot. Gonas is an avid gamer of course, and previous titles in his solo career include gems such as RotG, RotG 2, and the Duke Nukem Forever-esque vaporware “RotG 3D”.

This is also the first time we work with an external designer on an in-house project, the insanely talented interface design expert Mia Henriksson.

Watch this space and follow us on Twitter for the latest updates and info about an upcoming beta testing program, and of course the App Store release!

We are looking for any feedback, ideas, reactions or anything! Tell us what’s on your mind in the comments or via Twitter or email us!

As you may have noticed I also just updated the theme here on the Tap Gun blog. The new life!

Update: Holy shit, I’ve been stuck for hours now exploring the Barcode Battler related videos uploaded to YouTube. Try this one for size. This is a gold mine of bizarro.

Finally it’s out in the wild, our new monster app! This baby has been in the making for a while, but gosh it’s beautiful! There is so much you can do, and it’s almost as if it’s is giving you a massaging manicure while you are exploring it’s depth and inner chambers. God damn this app rocks, can’t wait until Limp Bizkit releases their new album and Fred Durst will serenade it on every damn song!

Nattstad is the swedish Facebook, but instead of ugly pimpleheads and annoying parents, your friends will be the hottest girls and boys, waiting for you at the most awesome bars and night clubs. Finally you will have the chance to enjoy the life you’ve seen on Gossip Girl. Check out the most daring blogs, pictures from the craziest parties and read up on what’s going on in Your town.

What are you waiting for? Roll over to the App Store and download this crazy mf and party hard!

Jösses what a month! We finally released our first batch, Bang/Buck (Mustang) and iQüeüe (Hollywood), and both have gotten lots of positive response. But is that it? Nah, we will continue to stroke some more juice out of the wardrobe, so watch out.

Project Goose

It’s getting harder and harder to work with Goose, every time you launch XCode to do something you end up running it in the simulator and suddenly three hours have passed by. We are really super excited about this product! Enjoying to play around with our own shit makes us feel a bit like Fred Durst, but that’s just awesome. We are still on schedule, so in early May we will kiss goose on the mouth and send him off to the AppStore. Did I tell you it’s awesome?

Project Jester

Jester is done, and we have already sent it to the reviewing committe. This one is so nasty that we didn’t give it a kiss, just enough money for the cab to Cupertino. We hope it will be accepted soon, so people are familiar with it before the next Olympics.

Other Projects

We have some great projects squatting our minds, looks like we will diversify the coming summer,but fear not; we will still make awesome apps for your iPhone. Our goal is still the same, coming up with digital solutions for navigating the analog world. Well, that’s all for now.

In our ongoing series of Tales from the Wardrobe I feel like writing a couple more words on our recently-submitted-to-the-App Store app, Project Hollywood (not to be confused with the other Project Hollywood).

Project Hollywood is laid out a little bit like an experiment — how fast could ÖeG finish an iPhone application? It started on Friday night when we were sharing a bag-in-box of wine. In this intoxicated state we finished the rudimentary interface but got stuck developing the actual underlying algorithm, as it requires logical thinking and focus. Something we were short on at 6am and drunk out of our minds.

The next morning I woke up and was still a bit frustrated, so I sat down and thought it through in a more sober state. It was then very simple, but nevertheless I took it upon me to write a report about it in LaTeX. It will be available for download along with the app when it’s been approved by Apple. At first I thought I’d just write the explanation, as is the more conventional way, in the code comments, but Xcode doesn’t allow for rendering mathematical formulae in the source files (it should.) Later at the office that day we spent an hour or two adding some animation to the interface.

On Sunday we didn’t spend any time on this project if I recall correctly, and then yesterday Jonas added some graphics and we tested it on the actual device and submitted it to the App Store. The resulting app may be a typical “ringtone app” in that it will be sold in the cheapest price range and have a very narrow focus, but we think it can be very useful (we’ve certainly wished we had it in the past – and so will you.)

Yep, today we sent two of our premium apps to Apple for some kind of reviewing process. And that means that they will say it’s awesome and release the beast soon. Oh yeah! One of the apps is Project Mustang, our first project and one that you have read a lot about here on the blog. It was battle tested last Wednesday, and after some small changes we decided that it was time to remove its chastity belt. The other app is a project that we named Project Hollywood. It will be a life saver for many of you, and even though it’s premium, this one will be so cheap that even your mother can buy it.

Yeah, it’s been a pretty awesome day and on our flickr you can see some pictures. Since it was a Monday we drank a nice bottle of Duval-Leroy and listened to Glasvegas. We have some more projects in line for release, Jester and a new one we’re calling Project Charlie. We are super excited about these projects, and we’re sure that this month will be more legendary than SmartSVN’s support.

We’ll update the blog design to reflect this soon. A narwhal with wings is pretty fucking closely related to our current Top Gun-theme though so the modifications will be subtle. Also note the typeface is Futura, often used on the dashboards in cockpits.

We just ordered business cards with the new logo while drinking champagne (because today is Champagne Monday) so that’s totally serious business.

Btw I love the fact that reddit brings on the BeOS hype today. Do you remember how fast it used to boot? Like 4 seconds on my old Pentium II. Sometimes I booted it up just to play some silly tanks game I downloaded off BeBits just because it was so quick. Makes me want to try out Haiku.